SWAMPED


Healthcare for the poor and the elderly has been diminishing steadily over the past years, as the baby-boom generation continues to retire and the poor continue to remain poor. However, healthcare for these groups have recently become more and more important as hurricane Katrina devastated the lives of thousands near the Gulf Coast.
Before Hurricane Katrina hit the coast, expected Medicaid cost to the United States was $329 billion, an amount, which when split between the government and the individual states, will end up being the single largest expense that the states will have. This incredible sum is not due, however, only to rising healthcare costs and rises in the cost of prescriptions, but also to the fact that health insurance itself has steadily risen, encouraging less and less companies to offer healthcare benefits to their employees.
Since its origination in 1966, Medicaid has increased its beneficiaries by thirteen times its original standing. The standard health insurance policy for one family has recently reached ten-thousand dollars, causing many small companies to no longer offer benefits to their workers. It is however, still important to offer healthcare to the poor, so the government has taken on a total of 52 million recipients, a number which has increased by nearly thirty percent within the last 5 years.
Prior to recent natural disasters, Congress had been planning to cut $10 million from the Medicaid program within the next 4 years, but once Katrina hit New Orleans, plans have altered slightly, due mostly to the fact that it is nearly impossible to deny aid to the thousands who had their homes and jobs washed away and fled into nearby states. Currently, nearly all of the people who lost their jobs as a result of the wrath of Katrina will qualify for Medicaid.
Although Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and much of the American economy, it has, at least in the short run, extended the benefits of Medicaid to a great number of needy Americans. The fact that a victim of Katrina, Maude Jordan, slept on top of her refrigerator in her home in New Orleans for three days before help arrived in order to avoid the flood and was denied eligibility for Medicaid after all of her possessions were swept away, only shows the problems that still remain in the Medicaid system. Rather than cutting millions upon millions of dollars from deprived and disadvantaged Americans in need of monetary assistance, time should be spent altering the system which decides eligibility of the poor. It is unethical for a family who makes forty thousand dollars a year to be able to claim Medicaid coverage for the care of their children when hundreds of thousands of Americans have no jobs and no possessions, except for in some cases, a refrigerator, and are denied coverage for themselves and their families.
Gaps in the coverage of Medicare also contribute to the high cost of Medicaid and the abandonment of those in need of care in desperate times. Since Medicare does not cover the cost of most nursing home care, Medicaid picks up the slack. However, sometimes even the wealthy can get coverage from Medicaid to cover the cost of their care. The selfishness of some Americans, and also the lack of necessary scrutiny over the distribution of governmental funds for the poor and the elderly, contribute to uneven and often times unfair treatment of the poor.


Source: “Swamped”. The Economist, September 22, 2005.